In honor of this occasion, I’m deviating from business for a moment, and shelling out some marriage advice that I am utterly unqualified to give.

👉 Embrace impermanence (that’s im-per-man-ence, not impotence — Godspeed if you’re dealing with the latter).

👉 Just f*cking talk.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

A reasonable person might advise a young couple to get aligned on life’s core plans before getting married. Plans like:

It’s hard to argue that this isn’t indisputably good advice.

But it has a giant gaping hole in it.

Because this advice doesn’t take into account that people grow, outlooks evolve, goals shift, and you’re almost certainly not going to be the same person 10 years from now that you are today. And the person you’re marrying is almost certainly not going to be the same person 10 years from now, either.

Yet we rarely even believe that’s actually going to happen — let alone are able to predict how it might happen, and make plans to address it. We believe the person we are now is the person we’ll always be.

There’s an actual scientific term for this—

It’s called the “End of History Illusion”.

In one of my favorite TED Talks, Psychologist and Professor Dan Gilbert astutely points out that "human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." 

What does he mean by that? We are all convinced the future we desire right now is the future we’ll always desire. But that’s almost never true.

Professor Gilbert examined studies involving over 19,000 participants between the ages of 18 to 68, and found that people of virtually every age believed they had changed substantially over the previous decade, but predicted they’ll change very little, if at all, over the next decade.

So a 30-year-old, looking back at themselves as a 20-year-old, says, “Good grief, what a naive little turd I was.” But that same 30-year-old, when asked what they think their personality, values, and preferences will be when they’re 40, would reply, “Ehhh, I’ve got my shit figured out now, I’ll basically be the same person.”

Of course, it’s easy to understand why a 30-year-old would think their 20-year-old self was an idiot. A 20-year-old doesn’t even have a fully developed prefrontal cortex yet. But the fascinating thing Professor Gilbert’s research reveals is the same sentiment stands true for:

It turns out, humans are able to accurately reflect on how much they have changed between the past and the present, but can’t accurately predict how much they will change between the present and the future.

So, as steadfastly as you believe in the direction of your life at this very moment, rest assured that your future self will look back one day and think you’re full of bullshit.

This is why marriage is so tricky. It’s inevitable that you’re both going to change and grow…

But will you grow together — or grow apart?

When Brennan and I got married, we were fully aligned on the future we desired.

We agreed that within five years, we wanted to move to the suburbs and begin having children. Brennan was to be the primary earner, and I would transition to a more flexible and less intense career situation to make space in my life for motherhood.

Fast forward 12 years—

Literally all of our most important future plans —that we had so dutifully agreed on— hit the shredder. And our marriage came shockingly close to going up in flames.

A few years after getting married, we took the first big step in our life plan, and moved to the suburbs. This was a hugely exciting time for us. I was thrilled beyond belief when we made a lowball offer on our dream house, and managed to close the deal.

Right before we moved, I distinctly remember lying awake in bed one night, overwhelmed by anxiety because I was too happy. 

Seriously. 

I didn’t believe I deserved to be as blissful as I was, and I was terrified that the universe was going to correct it by dropping some kind of disaster on our heads.

But instead of an external disaster (like a car crash, a devastating diagnosis, or the myriad of other mishaps I was imagining), the “disaster” that struck turned out to be my own shifting perspective—

I arrived to the suburbs, and promptly hated everything about my new life.

I couldn’t make friends. I was cooped up all day. I could almost feel my brain shriveling.

Day after tedious day, I’d look forward to Brennan coming home so I could have some stimulating conversation and feel normal again — but he was commuting into the city, and arrived home every day pissed off at the world after fighting traffic for hours. Understandably, he just wanted to lock himself in a dark room and decompress.

Months went by, and we became incredibly distant from each other.

I started escaping to the city as often as I could, staying out late, and feverishly trying to reconnect with a version of myself that felt energized and alive. Brennan was distracting himself with work, while trying to ignore my shitty behavior.

And we were both beginning to secretly resent each other.

As devastating as this situation was — it was also a blessing in disguise.

We had planned to start trying to have kids, but that —ahem— “activity that makes babies” doesn’t really happen when a husband and wife are rarely in the same room.

We were dodging each other, and our problems. But given that having a baby was the next “step” of our plan, a discussion on the topic soon became unavoidable.

Never, in my entire life, had I considered the possibility that I might not want children.

I have a massive family. My mother is one of 14 kids. No exaggeration — she has 13 true brothers and sisters. And like most little girls, I grew up playing house and imagining myself as a mother someday.

But what I hadn’t realized (when the shit began hitting the fan in the suburbs) is that I was no longer excited by the idea of having kids.

I was simply following our plan.

I wasn’t checking in with myself.

Until Brennan brought it up.

The “kid” talk turned out to be the catalyst for a much-needed “life” talk. We were both unhappy, but neither of us felt like we had the right to be, so we didn’t talk about it.

Brennan maneuvered around that by presenting a thought exercise — what might our lives look like if we didn’t have kids?

This thought exercise opened up the most important discussion we’ve ever had in our marriage, and the way he brilliantly framed the question enabled us to discuss it objectively. We could talk about our emotions without letting our emotions drive the discussion.

As we painted a hypothetical picture of our lives without kids, a theme emerged…

Things that make Kristin and Brennan unhappy:

Things that make Kristin and Brennan happy:

I entered this discussion truly believing that our marriage may not survive much longer. But after we both put aside our egos and spoke honestly, we realized that we had mislabeled each other as the causes of our unhappiness.

The actual cause of our unhappiness was the rigidity with which we had stuck to the plans we had made years before — without considering that our outlooks or desires may have changed.

Our love for each other, it turned out, was just as strong as ever.

Would we still have moved to the suburbs even if we had discussed our feelings before we made that decision?

Probably.

We couldn’t see the future, or anticipate how this huge lifestyle change would actually feel in practice. Nobody can. We simply arrived there, and came to realize that we didn’t like the situation we had placed ourselves in.

But the thing that made us desperately unhappy wasn’t our situation.

It was the misconception that we couldn’t change it — that this was now our permanent life — simply because we had labeled a random piece of real estate as our “forever house”.

After enduring this experience, we adopted an “impermanence mindset”.

Here’s how it works:

This approach makes both of us so open to trying new things, and so optimistic about our future, because we’re not locked-in to a predetermined path. Living this way has helped us discover dozens of “new versions” of ourselves — together. The more we change, the more our relationship strengthens.

Everybody grows.

And whether you grow together, or grow apart, boils down to a lot more than just luck.

So embrace impermanence, and just f*cking talk.

That’s my official marriage advice.

For whatever it’s worth. 🤷

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

P.S. — Happy Anniversary, baby! Thanks for sticking with me in calm and stormy seas. ❤